On the 21st, according to all-weather technology news, the big model startup Moon's Dark Side is currently undergoing a new round of financing. Investors include Tencent and Gao Rong Venture Capital. If discussed, LLM startups with domestic valuations exceeding 1 billion dollars will basically have Ali and Tencent.
Is Tencent investing in the dark side of the Moon too?
On May 21, according to all-weather technology news, the big model startup Moon's Dark Side is currently undergoing a new round of financing. Investors include Tencent and Gao Rong Venture Capital, and the pre-investment valuation is expected to reach 3 billion US dollars.
According to reports, in February of this year, Dark Side of the Moon completed Series A financing, with a financing amount exceeding 1 billion US dollars. Investors include Sequoia China, Xiaohongshu, Meituan, Alibaba, and old shareholders.
When the first version of the Kimi chatbot was launched in October of last year, Dark Side of the Moon was able to process as many as 200,000 Chinese characters in a single question and answer session. By March of this year, the upgraded Kimi was able to handle 2 million Chinese characters.
According to data from network analysis service company Similarweb, within a week of the launch of the new version of Kimi, Kimi's website traffic surpassed Baidu's AI chatbot Wenxin, making it the most visited chatbot in China.
Since then, Baidu and Alibaba have successively upgraded their LLM and introduced long text processing features.
And the rapid growth of LLM startups like Dark Side of the Moon is no exception.
In the US, only a few companies, such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, are developing the most advanced large-scale language models (LLM), while there are dozens of LLM model startups in China, which has the flavor of a “100 model war.”
Currently, domestic big language model startups can continue to flourish, not only thanks to financial support from venture capitalists, but also inseparable from technical and financial support from tech giants with large-scale cloud businesses such as Tencent and Alibaba.
Alibaba has now invested in Chinese startups developing large-scale language models, such as MiniMax, 10,000 Things, Smart Spectrum AI, Baichuan Intelligence, and Dark Side of the Moon.
Tencent, on the other hand, invested in MiniMax, Zhipu AI, and Baichuan Intelligence.
According to people familiar with the matter, Tencent is considering investing in the dark side of the month this time, probably to pave the way for deeper cooperation between WeChat and Kimi.
Tencent and Dark Side of the Moon did not comment on this.
Meanwhile, Alibaba and Tencent, which have large-scale cloud computing businesses, in addition to investing in some startups, are also building their own LLM models.
Ali created Tongyi Qianwen in May of last year, and Tencent immediately launched the mixed-yuan big model in September of last year, pointing the needle against Mai Mang.
For major domestic internet companies that have entered the era of stock competition, whether it's self-development of big models or crazy investment, there is a sense of FOMO. After all, what if they are betting on the next OpenAI?